Léon Blum

Biography

Léon Blum was born in Paris in 1872 into an assimilated Jewish merchant family from Alsace. He was a brilliant pupil at the Lycée Henri-IV, entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1890 but left after a year to study law at the University of Paris, and became both a member of the Conseil d'État and a well-known literary and theatre critic. The Dreyfus affair drew him into politics: from 1897 he campaigned for Dreyfus, came under the influence of Jean Jaurès and joined the socialist party, the SFIO.

After Jaurès was assassinated in 1914, Blum rose in the party leadership and in 1919 was elected a deputy for Paris. At the Tours Congress of December 1920 he led the minority that refused to join the Communist International, and he then rebuilt the SFIO, editing its newspaper Le Populaire. Through the 1920s he backed centre-left governments without joining them. After the riots of February 1934 he sought an alliance with the Radicals and Communists against fascism, which became the Popular Front.

The Popular Front won the 1936 election and Blum became France's first socialist and first Jewish prime minister. His government brokered the Matignon agreements and introduced the 40-hour week, paid holidays and collective bargaining, and chose non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War. He resigned in June 1937, served as deputy prime minister, and led a second short government in March and April 1938. In July 1940 he was one of the 80 parliamentarians who refused full powers to Pétain. Arrested by Vichy and tried at Riom, he turned the courtroom into an indictment of the generals and of Vichy's leaders and was never sentenced; the Germans then held him in Buchenwald and Dachau until 1945.

After the war Blum negotiated the 1946 Blum–Byrnes agreements on France's American debts and credits and headed the caretaker government of December 1946 to January 1947 that ushered in the Fourth Republic. He was briefly deputy prime minister again in 1948 and died at Jouy-en-Josas in 1950.